Subj : Re: Good examples of programming course lecture notes
To   : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer
From : Thomas Hawtin
Date : Wed Sep 21 2005 12:39 am

clemenr@wmin.ac.uk wrote:
> 
> In response to Thomas, it's very easy to say that if the lectures were
> slightly different then everybody would suddenly attend. 

I'm trying to say that, in my experience, traditional lectures are 
entirely pointless.

>                                                          From what I've
> seen both in my own lectures and in other people's lectures, it's a far
> more deeper rooted problem than that. Just because it's necessary for
> students to write down some notes doesn't make the purpose of a lecture
> "writing down notes". I shouldn't jump to conclusions based on a short
> paragraph you write in a newsgroup, but an allergic reaction to taking
> notes strikes me as being symptomatic of an attitude I sometimes see
> among students who are only prepared to be passive learners, not active
> learners. These students do things like asking for model answers for
> all practice problems, so that they can read them and pretend that they
> are studying.

I would assume requesting model answers indicates a need to understand 
what is required. A non-trivial question is unlikely to describe exactly 
what is required. For instance, the numerical methods course in my first 
year asked for a proof, I took that to mean that shoving some values 
into a calculator wouldn't do. Writing in a particular programming 
language, I would want to see other people's code.

>               It is possible for note-taking to overwhelm everything
> else in the lecture damaging the learning experience as a whole. But
> the other extreme of supplying such detailed notes that students do not
> need to write anything down is equally damaging as it allows students
> to believe that they've gotten everything that they need from a lecture
> without them ever actually switching on their brains during the whole
> process.

There's no requirement to have the brain switched on when copying down 
notes. But it will disrupt train of thought.

Tom Hawtin
-- 
Unemployed English Java programmer
http://jroller.com/page/tackline/

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